RFF-Berkeley Greenhouse Gas Impact Value Estimator (GIVE) Model

This integrated assessment model for estimating the Social Cost of Carbon has been developed as part of a multiyear effort by researchers at RFF, UC-Berkeley, and eight other leading institutions.

About the Model

RFF in conjunction with scholars at Berkeley have developed an open-source software platform that provides software tools and infrastructure to facilitate development, modification, and inter-comparison of integrated assessment models (IAMs). This platform, referred to as the Mimi framework, is specifically intended to provide the foundation for the scientific community’s improvement of estimates of the social cost of carbon estimates for the future. The capabilities provided by the framework, however, including the ability to construct and adapt models from pre-existing, open-source software “modules” provided by the community of users, have much broader application for integrated assessment modeling beyond estimation of the social cost of carbon.

At present, the Mimi framework currently provides the full set of functionality required for estimating the social cost of carbon, including native methods for estimating uncertainty from the estimates, and implements the near-term recommendations from the National Academy of Sciences to improve the transparency of estimates of the social cost of carbon. We have leveraged this framework to build the Greenhouse Gas Impact Value Estimator (GIVE) model, a new integrated assessment model that incorporated recent scientific advances that explicitly accounts for uncertainties in key model inputs including socioeconomic and emissions projections, the climate system, damage functions, and discount rates.

The Mimi framework has been used by the US Environmental Protection Agency in its formal rulemaking process to estimate of the social cost of hydrofluorocarbons for use in federal government benefit-cost analysis.

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